Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin-focused TBD business unit, a subsidiary of Block Inc., has announced the construction of a new decentralized web – Web5. Today’s article will review the basic concepts as well as notable points in this new decentralized web model.
Why Web5 instead of Web4?
The name Web5 is actually a marketing ploy, to show the superiority of the product. The number 5 here is implicitly superior to 1 level compared to 3.
Or correctly understood according to the explanation in Jack Dorsey’s document, Web5 is the result of the addition between:
Web2 + Web 3 = Web 5
This type of marketing communication can be seen in the strategy of another giant, Apple. Especially when Apple ignores Iphone 9 and someone complains about this leap.
Difference of Web5 with Web3
Different from Web3, where everything has to be encrypted or “blokchained”. Web5 uses a single blockchain, Bitcoin. In addition to Jack Dorsey being a big fan of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is also the most decentralized network. A suitable platform for creating truly decentralized webs.
At the same time it focuses on a single goal of ownership of digital identities and personal data.
Blockchain is not the most efficient technology at the moment. Because of that, using its cryptographic capabilities for all assets may not bring much utility.
Based on that, TBD applies the most advanced decentralized software to create Web5.
What problem will Web5 solve?
In the Web2 economy, our personal data will be stored in thousands of traditional corporate databases. These are social media companies that own digital identities from billions of users around the world.
There are already General Data Protection Regulations and some personal data protection regulations. However, it is impossible to ensure the security of data in the hands of thousands of companies.
Web5 was created to give back ownership of personal information as well as digital identity to users.
Decentralized Identities is the core aspect of this new decentralized web.
This can be thought of as a social identity that can be used and moved between different social media platforms. This is possible because Web5 users have in their hands their decentralized identity.
How does Web5 work?
To achieve the ambition of creating a truly decentralized web platform, Web 5 is operated on 4 main technology pillars including:
- Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
- Verifiable credentials (VCs)
- Decentralized Web Nodes (DWNs)
- Self-Sovereign Identity Service (SSIS)
These sections allow developers to focus on building user experiences. It also allows for decentralized identity and data storage in applications. In short, this new decentralized web leverages Bitcoin’s existing decentralized technologies.
Decentralized identifiers (DIDs)
DIDs provide a unique ID for every user. It is owned and operated by users, not third-party platforms (Facebook, Youtube).
This line of IDs will act as your public key in Web3.
To provide this ID, Web5 leverages ION – an open, public, and permissionless DID network.
This network is built on the Sidetree protocol, which is Bitcoin’s Layer 2. The protocol has trusted validators and doesn’t need tokens to work.
Through that, ION can help Web5 create true Decentralized Indentities.
Verifiable Credentials (VCs)
Once the ID for the decentralized identity is in place, the next step is the identity story.
Information of a particular user (identified by DID) is a VC (Verifiable Credential). This line of information can be your address or an electronic signature…
This mechanism works similar to ZK indentity in Web3.
Decentralized Web Node (DWNS)
DWN is a private data vault that stores encrypted public data. It can be said that DWN acts as a computer that stores and initiates connections and communication between DIDs.
The diagram below illustrates the interactions between 2 nodes of 2 decentralized identities in a Web5 environment.
It is “an emerging standard for data storage and message forwarding that enables entities to send and store encrypted or public messages.”
This breakthrough in storage technology has already been hinted at. Especially when Jack Dorsey is pretty clear about what web5 wants to break: Big tech and Web3.
Besides, if you consider the DVNS as a decentralized computer with the effect of storing information and operating.
Then Decentralized Web Apps (or DWAS) running on that computer are web applications with enhanced identification and decentralized data storage capabilities.
Self-Sovereign Identity Service (SSIS)
With enough decentralized identities, information storage and interaction facilities in place, we come to the story of how Web5 will manage the aforementioned decentralized identities?
SSIS is a decentralized identity management service that allows individuals and organizations to control their own digital identities.
SSIS interacts with standards around credential, credential revocation, credential request, credential exchange, data schema for credential, and verifiable data another smart phone, messaging through DWN and using DID.
Using these core standards, SSIS facilitates all interactions such as create, sign, issue, manage, request, revoke, exchange, authenticate, verify credentials (Verfiable Credentials) of varying degrees of complexity” on web5.
The ultimate crucial component on Web5 – Self-Sovereign Identity SDK. It is a toolkit that allows developers to easily build applications that use self-sovereign identity principles. It is designed to work with any identity management system and provides a set of tools and APIs to help developers create applications that allow users to control their own data.
Summary
Hope the above article is useful to you. Please leave comments and suggestions to help improve the article.
DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.
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